I see people connect to a "well connected" node on LN and by that they mean they connect to a node with lots of channels. The number of channels is actually a contra-indicator of a node's ability to route. Good routers curate and balance. Bad routers spam the open channel button. [Emphasis added]

What criteria should be kept in mind when evaluating nodes while opening new channels on the lightning network?

There are several kind of information we can look at (my autopilot currently only looks at the first ones):

Network topology:

How can I increase my centrality (e.g. by connecting to central nodes)

How can I increase my probability to have well funded routes by connecting to points where a lot of liquidity is floating around

Improve the network topology by increasing the amount of triangles

Geography: It is likely that you pay to services where you live and therefor you might want to connect to nodes that have a similar geoip as yours.

Node Provenance / properties:

age of Node (seen by oldest channels)

age of channels (seen by the blockheight of funding transactions)

uptime of the node (can be tracked via the gossip messages and the gossip store)

Routing fees of the node

Reliability of the node to forward payments (can be tracked by doing fake 1 satoshi payments to yourself over different routes)

most of the stuff that I mentioned here has been taken from my blog article about autopilots. In general I hope that better autopilots will emerge because I think this problem will be hard to decide by humans without investing a lot of time.

Finally another strategy could be to create routing tables in a similar way as the border gateway protocol does on top of IP. In that case nodes would share partial information about the channel balance so that we would have a better overview of where liquidity is missing.